All the issues that arise from the Ballon d'Or stem from misaligned expectations. Even after almost 70 years of footballers winning the thing, it's still unclear to many what exactly soccer's most prestigious individual prize is actually for. Is it meant to go to the single best player in the world? The best player on the best team? Should the winner have scored the most goals? Won the most trophies? How do you weigh club performances with national team ones? Does it even make sense to try to isolate and award an individual in what is an indivisibly collective sport? Is this whole affair so stupid, the criteria so unclear, the voters so random, the concept so flawed, that nobody should even care about it in the first place?
For better and for worse, the answer to all of those questions is "it depends." Sometimes it's easy, when the best player in the world wins literally everything for club and country and there's no need for a multifactorial analysis. Other times, as was the case for the men's Ballon d'Or this year, no candidate's case is undeniable, and so you're forced to wade into the subjectivity muck. It's these non-obvious Ballon d'Or years that bring the controversy, but also make it more interesting by sharpening what exactly the award is getting at. And this year's men's BdO was one of the most controversial ones ever.
Last Monday, France Football magazine, in partnership with UEFA, awarded Manchester City midfielder Rodrigo Hernández the Ballon d'Or. In its own right, Rodri's case was a strong one. Over the past couple years he has emerged as the most influential player on the best team in the world's best league. There's not a midfielder in the world whose impact on the game is as global as Rodri's. How Man City uses the ball, how it recovers it, how it defends against it, and even how it puts it in the back of the net are all to a significant extent dictated by Rodri. He's always been a tenacious defender and a sound and safe passer and decision-maker, as is to be expected of a defensive midfielder, but over the years he's both tightened and extended his grip on the game, becoming a dictator of possessions in the Toni Kroos mold, and, even more uniquely, a serious threat to assist and score goals himself.
Rodri's 2023-24 season was his apotheosis. He held the reins of yet another dominant Man City team that won its record fifth consecutive Premier League title while also reaching the FA Cup final and the quarterfinals of the Champions League, where they fell on penalties to eventual champions Real Madrid. Along the way, he compiled nine goals and 14 assists in all competitions—numbers even most attacking midfielders would be ecstatic to produce, let alone a DM. His crowning achievement came over the summer with Spain, where, along with Lamine Yamal, he was one of the two driving forces of a team that romped its way to the title at Euro 2024. The statistic that best exemplifies his influence is this one: From March 2023 up to the FA Cup final in May 2024, he played in 74 matches for both club and country and didn't lose a single one.
With a resumé like that, you might think it would be hard to find someone who would consider Rodri winning the Ballon d'Or some enormous miscarriage of justice. But fandom is a disease, and there are a whole hell of a lot of Real Madrid fans.
The controversy surrounding Rodri's Ballon d'Or actually began before Rodri won the Ballon d'Or. For months, much of the Spanish media had considered it a foregone conclusion that Real forward Vinícius would win the sport's premier individual prize. Presumably this confidence came from inside the club's and the Brazilian player's camps, since they too seemed certain that Vini's win was totally assured. One report even says Vinícius salved the wounds of the previous weekend's Clásico ass-kicking by partying late into the night in celebration of the golden ball he was sure he was about to win.
But the day before the ceremony the story had quickly changed. Reports in the Spanish press said that Real had somehow found out that Vini was not going to win the BdO, which was instead going to Rodri. Soon after, it came out that Vini—who had planned a private jet trip to Paris along with a 50-person entourage, whom he planned to gift Rolex watches after lifting his golden ball—had decided to boycott the gala, and that the rest of his Real teammates would refuse to attend as well in solidarity.
In the lead-up to and aftermath of the ceremony last Monday, at which Madrid's fears were born out after Rodri was named the winner, lots of people and media close to Real Madrid and Vinícius released statements of outrage, claiming the Brazilian had been "robbed." The guardians of Vinícius's honor have never really made clear the exact mechanism of, justification for, or culprit behind this supposed travesty, instead resting it all on vague gestures towards politics, corruption, and ulterior motives. In their minds, the only explanation for how Vinícius could fail to win this Ballon d'Or is if something shady happened.
Before assessing the merits of the Vini Hive's claims, it's worth laying out his case for the award. It is, to be fair, a strong one. Real Madrid once again won the Champions League and La Liga last season, and no player had a bigger hand in achieving those feats than Vinícius. As we've said before, Vinícius is the most relentless force in soccer today, and is maybe even its single best player. His only real competition for that latter title is his new teammate Kylian Mbappé, and regardless of which one you believe possesses the more lethal combination of skills, no one would seriously deny that Vini had the better individual season and therefore earned the right to call himself the world's best player. We can start with his stats—39 matches in all competitions, 24 goals, 11 assists—but, like any truly great player, the numbers, gaudy though they are, fail to encapsulate his magnificence.
The word that best describes his game is explosive. He takes the ball and things go boom. No matter where he picks up the ball, even deep inside his own half, he is an immediate threat to the opposing goal. He runs with a speed, power, and persistence that can at best be contained, and only for a while. Where he was once infamously indecisive and erratic in the penalty box, he is now an assassin. Not only does he combine the dribbling, shooting, and passing of the best final-third specialists, he has grown into a truly collective player who reads the game, assesses his options, and exerts his influence on affairs in ways that extend far beyond the rival penalty box. Like all great teams, Real Madrid had several massive talents who contributed to the team's success, but Vini and Toni Kroos were the two structural pieces upon which everything else was built. In short, Vinícius was the best last season, and being the best always makes you a contender for the Ballon d'Or.
Nevertheless, the tantrum Vini, Real Madrid, and Vini's supporters have thrown in response to him not winning the award is farcical. There's no question that Vini would've richly deserved the Ballon d'Or had he won it. But that doesn't mean that there were no other deserving potential winners, or that only some kind of anti-Vini or -Madrid chicanery could explain why the media members who vote on the award picked Rodri over Vini.
It goes back to expectations. In this case, Vinícius, his club, and much of the Spanish media had heard what they had erroneously assumed to be reliable information that the ball was already in Vini's bag, which set for them an expectation that was prominently, embarrassingly popped in front of the eyes of the world. The most sensationalist version of the conspiracy holds that UEFA, which for the first time ever was an official partner of France Football in the awarding of the prize, rigged the vote at the last minute to reward Rodri to punish Real Madrid for its role as one of the founding members of the detestable, UEFA-threatening Super League.
While technically not impossible, this idea is more than a little silly for several reasons. UEFA has already won the war against the Super League, and Real Madrid has twice won UEFA's prized Champions League since debuting the Super League scheme, so it would be odd if UEFA made its big move here instead of on the actual pitch, where it would've mattered much more. Not only that, it's funny to think that UEFA's grand plot to screw over Real would've involved handing a huge boost to Man City, a club UEFA has a live and even more antagonistic beef with.
The slightly less heated version of the conspiracy says that while the vote itself wasn't rigged, somebody out to humiliate Vini and/or his club intentionally leaked phony info that Vini's victory was assured in an effort to show him/them up when Rodri won the award. That version of events is maybe a little more plausible than the rig job, but barring any hard evidence to support it, it seems much more likely that someone involved received bad info that they then became overly confident in, stupidity always being a safer assumption than malice.
If you ignore the crazy talk about rigged votes and targeted leaks, there is one totally obvious explanation for why Vinícius didn't win the Ballon d'Or: Real Madrid had too many strong candidates for the award and therefore split the vote. The evidence for this is right there in the award's ranking. Filling out the podium for the BdO vote behind Rodri and Vini was Jude Bellingham. Behind the Englishman was Dani Carvajal in fourth. Kroos came ninth. It stands to reason that many voters who held Real's league and continental success in highest esteem when it came to awarding the BdO differed on which Real player was most deserving of the award.
Vini finished highest, no doubt buoyed by the consensus that he was the team's biggest star during that run, but all of his Blanco teammates had their own compelling cases to be awarded over the Brazilian. Carvajal also won the Euros alongside Rodri, while Bellingham (in an admittedly poor individual showing) got to the final with England. Kroos didn't get too far at the Euros with Germany, but you could see some voters being charmed by the "last dance before retiring" storyline and thus voting for him above all others as a sort of career achievement award. Vini, for his part, had a terrible showing at the Copa América, scoring two goals in one group stage match but being almost wholly anonymous in the other two, and watching from the sideline as Uruguay ousted Brazil in the quarterfinal, since Vini was suspended for picking up two yellows in the group stage. The demonstrable success of multiple Madrid players in the voting, the totally understandable uncertainty about which of the madridistas to rank highest, coupled with the well-established stupidity common to the voting body for these awards, all do a much better job of explaining how Vini lost out on an award so many are now pretending was preordained for him.
Again, we return to those pesky expectations. The most common refrain you hear from Vini's defenders is that he was the best in the world last season, and that any Ballon d'Or that fails to award the best player is fundamentally shambolic. But while the criteria for awarding the trophy is ambiguous, one thing even a cursory glance at the winners list will show you is that the Ballon d'Or has always been a more narrative, symbolic award than an purportedly objective assessment of skill or even achievement.
In the aggregate, the list of Ballon d'Or winners works best as a historical document that tries to reflect the spirit of each season by singling out an exemplary figure who best embodies the kind of story the award likes to tell. Being "the best" of course plays a part in this, especially since the best players tend to be the protagonists of the best teams and therefore of entire seasons, but that is only one of several considerations. The Messi-Ronaldo duopoly's dominance of soccer and the BdO itself threatened to confuse people of this fact, but the pair's decade and a half of essentially passing the award back and forth to each other was an anomaly that reflected their anomalous talent, where you really couldn't ever tell the story of any given season without starting with the two of them. Had the BdO always been simply about handing the ball to the equivalent of the (European) player with the highest rating in FIFA, we never would've seen Luka Modric win in 2018, or Fabio Cannavaro in 2006, or Pavel Nedved in 2003, or solidly half of the winners pre-2000 when the award regularly passed to first-time winners whom nobody confused for being the best of the best.
And it's there on the narrative level that Vinícius's case to win the 2024 Ballon d'Or was the weakest. Unlike the years when Messi or Ronaldo won, Vini has yet to solidify himself, narratively speaking, as his team's singular star, the man who stands front and center in the spotlight when his team wins. Not only that, for as great a player as he is, he's still not garnered the levels of respect and deference worldwide that his talents deserve. Part of this is a reflection of La Liga's slide and the Premier League's ascent in the struggle for prominence in the soccer world's imagination. Part of it is probably a casualty of Real's unceasing success, which seems to continue regardless of who is said to be leading the charge, and can undermine any one player's claim of ownership of that success. Part of it is also racism, with many fans and pundits put off by Vini's unabashedly brash on-field demeanor and, especially, his unwavering fight against the in-stadium racism he often receives for his "crimes" of being black, confident, and amazing.
I'd argue that the biggest reason for Vini's underrated standing in the game is his lack of success in international play. You could count on one hand the number of great games Vinícius has had while wearing Brazil's shirt, where he has time and again been curiously anonymous, even accounting for the general funk the national team has been mired in for the past decade. People can complain about annoying international breaks and the FIFA virus, but it remains the case that soccer's biggest, most important, most indelible stories are told on the international level, where Vinícius has hardly even appeared as a minor character.
In comparison, Rodri had much more narrative force behind his candidacy. Traditionally, Man City players have been harmed come Ballon d'Or time by the fact that the team's makeup and style of play resists easy attribution to anyone other than manager Pep Guardiola. In fact, the likes of Erling Haaland, Kevin De Bruyne, and Bernardo Silva have seen previous potential BdO campaigns hampered just like Vinícius's for failing to solidify themselves as their team's singular standout. But the last couple years have put Rodri front and center of the City project. His growing reputation as the lodestar of Man City's game and his prominent role in Spain's conquering of Europe helped the stars align in his favor this year.
And even more broad trends in the story of modern soccer helped his case. The Premier League has become unquestionably the strongest and most popular league in the world, and you can imagine voters being compelled to acknowledge this by finally awarding the BdO to an England-based player. On top of that, Spain has produced so many of the most memorable and influential players, teams, and also coaches in this generation, so much so that the prevailing tactical trends in the game bear unmistakably Spanish fingerprints. Handing the golden ball to Rodri is a way to symbolically commemorate that great tradition of Spanish play, in a way retroactively honoring the entire lineage of Xavi, Xabi, Iniesta, Cesc, Busquets, Silva, and the rest by having Rodri stand for them all and belatedly putting a crown on all of their heads through instantiation. Vinícius, in contrast, taps into no similar legacy, not when the main story of the Brazilians in these times is how far they've fallen from their heyday.
But if there is little merit to the caterwauling in Madrid, there may yet prove to be value in it. All the whining about injustice has centered focus on the idea that Vinícius is the clear best player in the world in a way that nothing else has yet in his still young career. If Vini lost this award for not having a salable story outside of what the stats and trophy counts themselves could tell, then this new one about an unfairly slighted superstar out to try even harder to take what was denied him is quite compelling. Going forward, it will be interesting to see how that story fights with and also against the stories his Ballon d'Or–hungry teammates Bellingham and Mbappé will hope to tell to support their own candidacies.
But regardless of whether anyone thinks Vini was or wasn't robbed for this trophy, and whether or not he ever wins one in the future, the most important thing to realize about the Ballon d'Or is that its importance, though real, is secondary. The Ballon d'Or doesn't bestow, it reflects; it describes rather than asserts. The actual location of everything the BdO tries to commemorate is on the field, in the talents and feats and achievements of the players, not in the core of the shiny trinket. In that way it is true what Vini's supporters have been saying, that he didn’t lose anything by not winning this time around, and nothing can take away his place as one of and maybe even the single biggest talent there is in the game today. It’s the BdO itself that loses when it mistakenly describes history or writes faulty narratives by awarding the undeserving; the deserving players—of whom there generally are several every season—always have been and always will remain much greater than the award itself. It’s just that this time the history France Football wrote was perfectly fine, and Vini will have many more opportunities to set the record straight.
